Virtual communities are becoming increasingly important vehicles for intense communication and dissemination of new ideas in the online world. Some examples of virtual communities include a community formed as a group of mobile telephone numbers of close friends engaging in instant messaging, often referred to as a “buddy list”, a community formed as a group of e-mail addresses in e-mail applications and a community formed as a group of participants or members of an Internet chat room. Relationships arising between members of these communities form so-called social networks.
Today, virtual communities are used not only to voluntarily develop and discuss ideas within specific interest groups but also are of increasing value for a commercial advertiser to conduct an effective marketing campaign. In essence, virtual communities offer “word-of-mouth” marketing from one member of the community to another and can also constitute endorsement networks whereby one member endorses a product or services causing another member to purchase that product or service. In fact, virtual communities are increasingly being perceived as one of the strongest marketing techniques currently available.
Most online applications also utilize in their marketing campaigns, whether consciously or unconsciously, viral effects generated within and between social networks. Specifically, creation and expansion of virtual communities can be carried out using viral marketing techniques to allow existing members of these communities to recommend or invite new members into their community.
However, expansion of virtual communities using viral marketing can lead to uncontrolled membership growth and misusage of the virtual communities. This is particularly problematic in cases where the members of the virtual community are provided with valuable benefits such as free electronic mail, free videos, discounts to stores, free voice communication to mobile devices, free text messaging, discount in communication, free stuff in stores, etc.
Another concern of maintaining a virtual community is determining the proper balance of the community vis-à-vis a limit on the number of invitations a member of the community can extend to non-members to join the community. Allowing a member of the community with only few friends to extend ten invitations to join the community does not provide a significant increase in the value of the virtual community but may rather cause the virtual community service to appear overly restrictive. On the other hand, for a member with a large network of friends who would be a good fit for the virtual community, the possibility of extending only ten invitations would diminish that member's likelihood of actively participating in the virtual community and squander a good opportunity to significantly increase the value of the virtual community.
In light of this dilemma, a common technique to control expansion of a virtual community is to grant members of the virtual community a limited number of invitations they can extend with the number of invitations dependent on the member.
For example, members of Google's Gmail virtual community could initially extend only three invitations to non-members to join their community. However, members who satisfy certain criteria set by Google, based for example on activity, could be provided with the ability to extend more invitations. FIGS. 6A and 6B show examples with an active member being provided with a larger number of invitations (FIG. 6A) than a less active member (FIG. 6B).
FIG. 7 shows a prior art technique for extending invitations from one member of a virtual community to a non-member to join the virtual community. Initially, a first user of the communications network which enables access to the virtual community and who is a member of the virtual community, A-user 1, directs an invitation server 3 which manages the virtual community to invite a second user, B-user 2, to join the virtual community, e.g., by sending a message S1 to the invitation server 3 such as “Invite B to service”. The invitation server 3 includes a computer software program to check whether A-user 1 is authorized to invite a user to the service, i.e., to join the virtual community. If A-user 1 is so authorized, then the invitation server 3 sends a message S2 to B-user 2, for example, “you are invited to join service”. The message typically contains a unique key or URL for B-user 2 to use when registering with the service. B-user 2 returns the key in a message S3 to the invitation server 3 and the invitation server 3 then grants service for B-user 2, i.e., allows B-user 2 to join the virtual community by sending a message S4 to this effect. In this invitation process, direct contact between A-user 1 and B-user 2 is not required.
Similar arrangements are typically used also in some web-based marketing campaigns to solicit, or direct advertising material to, non-participants based on a referral from a participant. In this case, a first participant in the marketing campaign connects to a web server/service and provides an e-mail address or other contact information for a second, non-participant to receive marketing material. The server sends an e-mail or other message (regular mail, sms, mms) to the second non-participant. In this arrangement, the second non-participant typically receives a message from the server indicating it has been sent by an unknown party, i.e., the second non-participant is not advised that the marketing material was sent at the request of the first participant. This may results in the message being classified as junk or trash mail so that the second non-participant does not review the marketing material. The purpose of the marketing campaign has thus been frustrated.